Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Since 2008, I have participated in a 30-team fantasy baseball keeper league. One of the areas that most owners pay close attention to is prospect watching – pick up the right youngster at the right time and you can either hold onto him while he matures into a solid talent or trade him off for a proven big leaguer to someone who values his potential.

Last season, when I was still writing at Bus Leagues Baseball, I grabbed a bunch of Top 100 prospect lists from around the internet and wrote them into my Baseball America Prospect Handbook. Since that was always in my bag, all I had to do was flip to a particular player to see where he fit in the grand scheme of things. I did the same thing this year, but took it one step further and put seven different highly respected lists into a spreadsheet*: Baseball America, Fangraphs, Baseball Prospects, MLB.com, John Sickels, Keith Law, and Scout.com.

*I’m not opposed to adding more lists to the spreadsheet – in fact, former Bus Leagues star Scott Grauer is unveiling his Top 100 at DRaysBay this week – but those are the ones that are in there for now.

There ended up being 166 different names in the spreadsheet, which seemed like a low number**. So I decided to count up how many different lists each player appeared on, to give me an idea of how each prospect was regarded by the evaluators as a group, and separated them out accordingly.

**Of those 166, 164 are owned by teams in Lozoball. The only two who aren’t are Chris Reed, who is a free agent, and Nick Tropeano, who hasn’t been added to the CBS Sports system, which hosts our league.